Well I guess I will answer my own question since I figured it out this
morning. :)

Turns out that the Win2k box that was running  the CORBA orbd server
also has a DNS running on it. And when the DNS was unable to do a
reverse lookup on the CORBA client  PC it hung. After adding a reverse
lookup for the client PC into the Win2k DNS the string_to_object()
returned instantly everytime. The string_to_object() must be forcing
a reverse lookup on the client that is connecting to it.